E.M. Forster, “E.M. Forster, Middle Manager”
Forster was not a middle manager, but he led a kind of middle management lifestyle free from the usual excesses of the creative spirit and exceeding the license so allowed. He shows up in this collection primarily because of his literary criticism a work as an editor rather than his creative works. After all, this is itself a volume of criticism.
Henry James and George Eliot, “Henry and George”
George Eliot was the pen name of the woman who wrote the novel Middlemarch; routinely found on just about any list of the best ten to one-hundred novels of all time. Henry James was a novelist whose own work is likely to appear on those same lists, but it is in his role as literary critic analyzing Middlemarch that is he found here. Alert readers may sense a trend developing.
Luchino Visconti, “Notes on Visconti’s Bellissima”
Visconti was once one of the most renowned film directors in the world. (Actually, he still is, but not nearly as famous for being so.) Bellissima is a 1951 example of Italian Neorealist cinema which satirizes the film industry. The essay could be called a review of the film, but that would hardly do it justice. Movie reviews are to be found in the book—the very next chapter, actually—but what the author writes here is better described as an analytical critique of the film that expands from the narrative of the movie itself to consider how movies at the time had portrayed friendships between gay men and straight women while answering what Smith identifies as “the classic Italian philosophical problem: blonde or brunette?” For Visconti, it is the latter.
George Clooney, “At the Multiplex, 2006”
George Clooney has gotten his fair share of comparison to classic Hollywood studio-era movie stars. Usually they are at the lighter end of the spectrum, actors like Cary Grant and Clark Gable who moved effortlessly between comedies and drama, but never really made it into the company of those later 1950’s intense Method-acting rebels like Montgomery Clift or James Dean. The author actually goes one step further in “changing her mind” about Clooney from thinking him “one of those actors who prides himself on making the big bad movies in order to fund the small good ones.” And with her change of attitude that he is simultaneously the most popular actor in Hollywood and its biggest social agitator, for perhaps the first and only time in print, George Clooney is likened to a modern day incarnation of “Marlon Brando, an actor whose personal failings and self-regard overran all his most serious ambitions.”
David Foster Wallace, “The Difficult Gifts of David Foster Wallace”
The actual title of this piece is “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men:” with the comes the part about the difficulty of the author of that book coming after the colon. The essay is about the author’s work and significance to modern American literature overall, but it pays special attention to Wallace’s book mentioned in the title. That said, there is really just one explanation for why it is included here and, likely, why it is the concluding chapter: publishing her essay shortly after the author's premature death, Smith admits that Wallace had been her favorite living writer.
